a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a seat attachment assembly for use to attach a seat onto a vertical wall in such a manner that the position of this seat along the vertical wall may be easily adjusted whenever desired.
The invention also relates to the specific application of this seat attachment assembly to install a seat in a locomotive driver's cab, either directly onto a wall of this cab or onto a seat-supporting rail already fixed to this wall.
b) Brief Description of the Prior Art
It is known that in most of the locomotives of rail-road trains presently in operation in North America, at least one seat is mounted onto a horizontal rail fixed onto one of the side walls of the driver's cabin, in such a manner as to be slidably adjustable. The seat which is so mounted, is intended to receive the locomotive's driver or any other person accompanying this driver.
FIG. 1 is a schematic, cross-sectional view of an existing seat-installation assembly for locomotive driver's cabin. As is shown in this Figure, the existing assembly 1' used to attach a seat 3 onto a vertical side wall 5 of the locomotive driver's cabin comprises an horizontal C-shaped rail 7' that is welded or riveted onto the side wall. The assembly also comprises a seat carrier 9' which supports the seat 3 in a cantilever manner at a given distance away from the side wall 5. This seat carrier 9' comprises a seat supporting member 11' provided with a vertical hub 13' in which the seat 3 is pivotably mounted; it also comprises three supporting arms rigidly connected to the seat supporting member 11'. Two of these three arms numbered 15', are symmetrical and project from the member 11' up to the rail 7'.
These two arms 15' have free ends spaced apart from each other, each of these free ends being provided with a metal disk 21' that is sized to slidably fit into the rail 7' and be held therein. The third arm 19' projects from the member 11' down to the side wall 5 and is provided at its free end with a positioning pin 23' sized to fit into any perforations 25' of a line of identical perforations made in the side wall 15, the line extruding under the rail 7' in parallel relationship therewith.
This existing assembly 1' is efficient to attach the seat 3 onto the side wall 5. It also allows adjustment of this seat 3 at different locations along the rail 7', by slightly tilting the seat 3 and seat carrier 9' to disengage the pin 23' from the perforation 25' in which this pin is inserted and then sliding the assembly along the rail 7' up to the location where the seat should stand and another perforation 25' can be found.
In practise however, such an adjustement is not very easy because, most of the time, the disks 21' are jammed into the rail or jam therein when the seat carrier 9' is tilted up to disengage the pin 23'. As a matter of fact, this jamming and the effort to be made to adjust the seat 3 in a locomotive driver's cabin is apparently a major source of back pains.